No More Pentagon Dinners: Al Qaeda Leader Killed… Again

According to a “senior US administration official”, Al Qaeda Boogie Man Anwar al-Awlaki has been reported killed in an air strike in Yemen, which is the exact same way he died in 2009.

The Yemeni defense ministry confirmed the claim, stating that the same counterterrorism unit that killed Osama bin Laden used a drone and jet strike in Yemen to kill al-Awlaki.

“Cynics will point to the strategic timing” notes TIME, adding “just a week after embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned from four months of medial treatment in Saudi Arabia following an attack on the presidential compound.”

Moi? Cynical? Never.

There are a couple of issues I would like to address, however.

Why should we believe the American born cleric al-Awlaki, who has been linked with everything from the aborted Christmas Day underwear bombing to the ink toner plane bomb plot, is dead this time around?

Like many supposed terrorist leaders before him, Awlaki has previously been reported killed.

On December 24, 2009 several news outlets reported that Awlaki was believed to have been killed in a joint U.S-Yemeni pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of 30 or so senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd, a remote mountain valley in eastern Shabwa.

The Reuters news agency spoke to an unnamed Yemeni official at the time who said: “Anwar al Awlaki is suspected to be dead (in the air raid).”

Then on December 29 it was reported by Newsweek that a Yemeni journalist called Abdul Elah Hider al-Shaya had been in contact with Awlaki after the air raid, and was claiming that he was still alive.

The report stated:

There is no independent way to confirm Shaya’s account and U.S. intelligence officials are now ducking the question of whether they believe Awlaki is dead or alive. “His status is not entirely clear,” a U.S. intelligence official says.”

Between then and now, the so called “key leader” of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has popped up in several slick videos and was said to have produced al Qaeda’s signature English-language internet magazine.

Similarly, the “Toronto 18″ terrorists turned out to be “a bunch of incompetent guys who were primarily misled by a delusional megalomaniac”. The explosive fertilizer material the terrorist cell apparently planned to use was in fact purchased by an informant working for the RCMP who had radicalized the group.

It is inconceivable that top Department of Defense officials were unaware that Al-Awlaki was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the first eight days after the Sept. 11 attacks because of his ties to the three hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour.

Nevertheless, not only did he dine with the military’s finest, he was given a glowing report by the Defense Department for his role as the featured guest speaker on “Islam and Middle Eastern Politics and Culture.”

These revelations were unveiled in internal Department of Defense emails obtained under the freedom of information act.

Researcher Webster Tarpley has documented, Awlaki is “an intelligence agency operative and patsy-minder” and “one of the premier terror impresarios of the age operating under Islamic fundamentalist cover” whose job it is to “motivate and encourage groups of mentally impaired and suggestible young dupes who were entrapped into “terrorist plots” by busy FBI and Canadian RCMP agents during recent years.”

If Al-Awlaki really is dead this time around, the Pentagon has lost one of its top go-to men as far as the manufactured “war on terror” is concerned.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.